Bitcoin Cash Jumps 10% after Binance, Bitcoin.com Reveal Fork Plans

The bitcoin cash price awoke from its slump on Friday, mounting a double-digit percentage rally during the early evening hours after two major cryptocurrency firms revealed their plans for the BCH hard fork that is scheduled to take place in less than two weeks.

Bitcoin Cash Posts Double-Digit Rally

Like most of the large-cap crypto market, bitcoin cash had been in recent weeks been uncharacteristically stable, and the fourth-largest cryptocurrency spent most of Friday morning trading near $425. Shortly after 12:45 UTC, however, the bitcoin cash price leaped above $450 in a matter of minutes, ultimately touching $470 before falling back to a present value of $465.

The surge translated into a daily move of more than 10 percent, ranking bitcoin cash as the second-best performer among the top 100 cryptocurrencies, trailing only small-cap project Ravencoin as of the time of writing.

Binance, Bitcoin.com Appear to Side with ABC in Fork War

The rally showed some correlation with two separate announcements from large cryptocurrency firms Bitcoin.com and Binance indicating how they will approach the impending Bitcoin Cash software hard fork, which, as CCN reported, stems from deep-seeded disagreements about what technological upgrades should be activated on the network and threatens to sever the BCH blockchain into multiple competing versions.

In their announcements today, both Binance — the largest cryptocurrency exchange — and Bitcoin.com, the BCH-promoting website owned by Roger Ver, indicated that they would support the BCH version promoted by development team Bitcoin ABC — not the alternative client release by Craig Wright-linked firm nChain and mining pool operator CoinGeek.

Bitcoin.com stated outright that its mining pool, wallet, block explorer, and other services will run the fork-compatible Bitcoin ABC client. Concurrently, these services will the latest client from Bitcoin Unlimited, who has sought to broker a compromise and give miners the opportunity to vote on which individual upgrades they would like to activate. While not addressed directly, the announcement makes clear that the company will not support SV.

Binance’s announcement was somewhat more opaque, stating that it would support the Bitcoin Cash hard fork but did not address what software client(s) it would support. Crucially, though, the announcement referred users to the “official announcement” for the hard fork and linked to the bitcoincashorg GitHub repository, which lists the upgrade-set included in the ABC client. CCN has reached out to Binance for clarification on whether they will exclusively support this BCH version.

While these statements do not completely erase the uncertainty surrounding the Nov. 15 fork, they do suggest that, if the major companies that provide BCH infrastructure continue to line up behind ABC, the so-called hash wars may prove to be less ugly — and disruptive — than they could have been.